October Publishers Newsletter 2025
ida decesaris
Dear Friends,
The world is beset with violence and suffering. At times, that suffering seems distilled and concentrated in a particular region or strip of land. But it is universal. And so is the age-old question of how to wrest meaning from intolerable circumstances.
In Where is God? An African Theology of Suffering and Smiling, Stan Chu Ilo, a Catholic priest and theologian from Nigeria, addresses this question from the African experience. The subtitle refers to a popular Nigerian song, “suffering and smiling,” an allusion to the spiritual resources that allow many Africans to survive. Though focused on Africa, Ilo’s multi-layered and multi-disciplinary approach offers a broad challenge to theologians everywhere to listen to the actual experience of people, to take seriously the lived faith of those who suffer, and to make sure that our theology always points to and strengthens the capacity to hope.
Ilo’s book is a counterpart to the similarly-titled book by Salvadoran Jesuit Jon Sobrino: Where is God? Earthquake, Terrorism, Barbarity and Hope. Sobrino too notes that the problem of suffering has traditionally raised questions about the nature of God. But, he says, the primary questions are addressed to ourselves: Who are we? What does it mean to be human in such a world? In examining the cruelty of history from the standpoint of the victims, Sobrino discerns a challenge not just to find meaning, but to answer a call to personal conversion, structural change, compassion, and solidarity.
These questions also underlie a new book edited by Miguel A. De La Torre and Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb: Tear Down These Walls: Decolonial Approaches to Barriers and Liberation. The essays here look at walls and barriers—whether physical, psychological, or spiritual—that separate communities, races, and nations. The examples include the US/Mexico Border Wall, the Berlin Wall, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, Israel’s “security wall,” the South African system of apartheid, and others. The authors assess the cultural, psychological, and spiritual impact of raising such walls—and what it would mean to “tear them down.”
Without overlooking the reality of suffering, it is also important to remain attentive to manifestations of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. That is the underlying message of Epiphanes of Nature & Grace: Twelve Meditations from a Life in Dialogue. Cyprian Consiglio, a Camaldolese Benedictine monk, whose monastic path has deeply intersected with the spiritual wisdom of Asia, writes about a dozen spiritual topics including baptism, Eucharist, vocation, and church. But what unites them all is the attitude derived from a “life in dialogue”—an attentiveness to signs of our underlying unity. Those signs help to empower hope, the energy that results in effective love, a healing response to a world fractured and divided by walls, fear, and hatred.
Such an epiphany was famously experienced by Thomas Merton in downtown Louisville, when he felt himself suddenly “awakening from a dream of separateness.” “There are no strangers,” he wrote. “If only we could see each other as we really are all the time.”
Peace,
Robert Ellsberg
Publisher